Raw Voting Data Now Available (ie da Feedback)

I am working on a little spreadsheet to get some interesting idea such as "what was the average female score for a given game in each category" and also what did each level of casual to hardcore gamer rank the game. I haven't decided how I am going to break down age yet, so that isn't included. An interesting category might be those English speakers versus non-English speakers (or non native English speakers) ... I will get to see which games had the greatest differential between those two categories, and those developers would probably realize that localization is needed for a game like that in order for it to reach its widest potential audience. Also, my results will only be as good as the data entered: hopefully nobody lied on the survey results, and hopefully there was a random sampling of those who responded and those who did not respond to the survey, to make this a bit more meaningful. Should I post the results once I finish, or should I wait until winners are announced??

Read the above data as follows: "Male voters gave an average of 58.54% higher score on Cubic's Rube than female voters" or "The average male score was 27.28% higher than the average female score for Bug Thug".

The main reason CubicsRube is at the top of the list is because only one female voted on it, and she gave it all ones.

Interestingly, these were the ONLY games that males awarded higher scores to than females. It seems females either had more forgiving scores in general, or the games produced for this contest simply had more appeal to females who voted in the contest.

The top eleven games females liked more than males, using the same formula for the percentage are as follows:

As before, the top four games on this list received perfect votes from all females who voted on them, usually just one or two. Nanocrisis also received a "perfect" 5 score from all females, but the male vote was so high that the percentage still dropped it down to ninth on the list.

And this next list is a list of games that might have benefitted from localization, or else they just appealed to an English speaking audience better. Or maybe it was random chance, there's always that.

In general, non-native English speakers gave higher scores than native English speakers. (So if you appeal to more female and non-native English speakers, will you get more of their generally higher votes? Maybe. Hmnnnnn.)

Well, here is a final analysis of 'da feedback from 'Da Falcon. As always, this is interesting information that shouldn't influence anyone's thoughts as to who actually won anything in the contest.

Now I want to look at how games appealed to casual vs. hardcore gamers. With some exceptions, games fell into a bell curve with scores peaking at one level of "hardcoreness" and falling off around that level. I'm going to look at the top games in each category.

First, here are the overall rankings (including graphics and sound/music)

Here are the top ten rated games by Casual (1) gamers in overall score:

*[Starport had some odd numbers due to low voter turnout on this game, and so few of the votes had survey information attached, and those that did gave the game abnormally high scores, compared to average scores for this game -- so you will see it on my lists often. RoboRubOut, PictureFrameX, Goldgeier, and Splock also had some abnormally non-representative numbers for these categories]

Here are the top ten rated games by Semi-casual (2) gamers in overall score:

So, I hope these lists were of some interest to all of you curious cats out there. If you want me to mine for more data, well, I'd have to create some all-new spreadsheets, but if you ask real nice I'll probably do it anyway. I like playing with numbers, even if they aren't the most meaningful numbers.

It probably isn't just you, Jaisor :-) I added a bit of explanation for what the percentages are supposed to mean for male/female english/non-english scores. As for the top ten games for each level of casual or hardcore gamer, I'm not sure how useful it is, but it should at least be self explanatory. In case it isn't, the survey asked voters to rate themselves as more casual or more hardcore gamers, and my list averages the scores for voters in each category then presents the rankings. I am not presenting the actual numbers to keep these lists from giving any real information about who may or may not have won the contest in any given category, especially because they would probably mislead anyone who took them that way: I am only counting voters who answered the survey, but all votes count for the giving of awards. Does that make sense?

It makes perfect sense, Skyhawk! Your game is all about being black or white, one way or another, all or nothing. So those "semi-casual" and "semi-hardcore" gamers felt you were discriminating against them and voted accordingly.

Actually, Skyhawk, your game had appeal to the "middle" gamers too, but relative to the other entries, yes, very casual and very hardcore gamers preferred Icarus.

I liked icarus, but I was too much disappointed by its length. I mean, you have fun playing it, but its a 30 second fun!!! "wow, this game is cool! oh... its finished... ****!" That really annoyed me, but i refrained myself from giving you all zeros which I should have :-P

WordBeGone relied rather heavily on the English language in the actual gameplay, yet was rated higher by non-native English speakers? That's weird. But perhaps not since the uDG voting pages are themselves in English so there is an implicit filter on the sample. It's really a "non-native English speakers who understand English well enough to participate in the voting" statistic. Anyway, I'd be careful about concluding anything from the those particular statistics.

I went through all the data, and removed obvious data that was out of place, such as people who posted they were "120" years old, or would pay "$1m" for a game.

Concerning the data, I learned alot about how to gather it this year, and how to improve it for next year. What I will do is NOT place it in the voting process, But rather, AFTER the voting is done, have it set up as it it's own survey, and have all questions mandatory. To be considered for a door prize, you will need to do this survey. But once done, you won't have to do it again and again as with this year. Yeah, I wrote on the survey pages that voters ONLY needed to provide the data once, but some people added it more than once.

One other problem. I noticed that some females would state their name, but leave Gender as Male. This is because the default was set to Male, so it took a tiny effort for them to change the Gender option. I went ahead and fixed that for obvious voters who were females, but when voters didn't supply a name, there was no way to know their gender.

Anyways, this year is a "start." We can't read TOO much into the data, but it is fun. Next year, we will need to do this part of the contest better.

Quote:Should I post the results once I finish, or should I wait until winners are announced??

If you could, please try to do it in a report form. Listing stats, as the last poster said, makes some people's heads spin. If you can make summaries, or conclusions, then it is much easier I think.

Najdorf Wrote:I liked icarus, but I was too much disappointed by its length. I mean, you have fun playing it, but its a 30 second fun!!! "wow, this game is cool! oh... its finished... ****!" That really annoyed me, but i refrained myself from giving you all zeros which I should have :-P

never fear, I have decided (as in there is a 90% probability) that I will for sure make 1 more level of at least 3-5 minutes (minimum) in length. It will take place in tartarus.

Note: before calculating these averages, I deleted all amounts above and including $40 (otherwise, some games' results would be very unrealistic, since many had "$50", and even "$100" - for a shareware game?). Perhaps I should have used a smaller value?

Carlos Camacho Wrote:So, is that saying that the public feels most shareware should fall between $10 and $15

Yes, I made a very surprising discovery !

Carlos Camacho Wrote:To improve your data, place game genre. And tell us if game genre has any impact on what the public is willing to pay.

If there aren't going to be any changes to the raw data, I have a lot of *complex* correlation analysis I can make, but since those take time I was going to wait until the data was set in stone... If it is, I'll start right away... well, not right away since it's 4:24 AM here in Argentina and I should get some sleep, but today.

I forgot to ask: I know that for privacy reasons IP, names and email addresses were stripped, but do you have any "arbitrary code" to distinguish votes from the same voter? With that info we could find out interesting stuff like:
* How many games did the average voter rate?
* Did most voters rate only specific genres (only puzzles or only arcades or 3D...)
* Are there any 5-5-5 votes for game X, 1-1-1 for everyone else voters?